Microsoft has introduced a new design for data centers to optimize artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, implementing a cooling system that it claims will consume zero water. The design is part of the company’s aim to reduce strain on the local resources of the communities where its data centers are located, as it continues to scale infrastructure to support AI and other technology investments.
The design, launched in August, uses a closed loop system to deliver precise temperature control without water evaporation, the company said in a blog post published this week by Steve Solomon, Microsoft vice president, datacenter infrastructure engineering.
Traditionally in Microsoft data centers, water has been evaporated on-site to reduce the power demand of the cooling systems. Going forward, Microsoft will replace evaporative systems with mechanical chip-level cooling, Solomon said.
These will allow the data centers to use warmer temperatures for cooling than previous generations of IT hardware, and thus “mitigate the power use with high efficiency economizing chillers with elevated water temperatures,” he wrote. However, he said, “the result is a nominal increase in our annual energy usage compared to our evaporative data center designs across the global fleet.”
Pilot projects forthcoming
Microsoft will pilot zero-water-evaporated designs with new data center projects in Phoenix, Arizona and Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, in 2026. Meanwhile, new designs since August began using the next-generation cooling technology, with the first of these sites to come online in late 2027.
Microsoft has made an effort to reduce its water consumption in its data centers in recent years, as part of its sustainability efforts, Solomon said. Water efficiency in data centers is generally measured through Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), which divides total annual water consumption for humidification and cooling by the total energy consumption for IT equipment. Microsoft has improved its WUE by 80% since its first generation of datacenters, he said.
Water-based cooling is not the only cooling option for data centers, however. Many also use air cooling systems. While evaporative cooling consumes less energy, but significantly more water, air cooling consumes no water, but significantly more energy.
One factor companies can consider when placing data centers is to “pick a cooling technology that is symbiotic to the local environmental conditions,” according to a blog post by Andrew Higgins, global head of masterplanning and sustainability at data center and collocation provider Equinix.
“For instance, [operators] might use air cooling in water-stressed areas to limit water consumption, and use evaporative cooling in other areas to capitalize on the energy-efficiency benefits, particularly where the carbon intensity of the power grids is high,” he wrote.
Data center operators who use water for cooling are increasingly looking for ways to optimize efficiency, not just because of how valuable the natural resource is, “but increasingly because of more stringent regulatory targets and reporting requirements,” Higgins added.
Applying the closed loop to the data center
A closed-loop system that recycles water used for cooling is not a new concept. In fact, it has existed in manufacturing for years, Titus M, practice director for Everest Group, said.
Now it’s becoming an increasingly attractive option for data centers that use water for cooling because of the major challenge operators face to lower their carbon footprint and overall resource consumption, even as energy requirements increase due to technologies such as AI, he said.
“With GPUs and XPUs in the picture, both of which are very power-hungry, we have reached a stage where investing in closed-loop water cooling solutions is economical,” M said. GPUs also increase the heat generated by chips and thus in data centers, he said.
From a Microsoft perspective, implementing new solutions to improve resource efficiency is necessary going forward, given the company’s large data center footprint that will only continue to expand exponentially with the company’s investment in AI and other cutting-edge technology.
Positioning these solutions as sustainability initiatives, then, “provides positive branding” for the company, as Microsoft is likely to face investor scrutiny on how it’s reducing its carbon footprint amid new data-center deployments, M added.
Source:: Network World